2011The International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection

Matlab-based voltage stability analysis toolbox and its validity check

WEI YanFang*, WEI ZhiNong, SUN GuoQiang
College of Energy and Electrical Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China;

Abstract: A novel Voltage Stability Toolbox(VST) is introduced, which is programmed using Matlab math language, and the
features of its open source code and a complete set of user-friendly graphical interfaces are detailed. It implements standard
Newton-Raphson (NR) and Newton-Raphson-Seydel (NRS) convergent algorithms to analyze the voltage stability and bifur-
cation of power system. The main functions of VST include power flow, time domain simulation, singularity analysis, eigen-
analysis, as well as static and dynamic bifurcation analysis. VST is a very helpful tool to understand voltage stability and non-
linear bifurcation phenomenon. Test results of the application of this toolbox in a five-bus system with three generators and
30-bus test system are presented to show the practicality and effectiveness of the VST.

Keywords: voltage stability toolbox; Matlab; voltage stability; bifurcation analysis

1 Introduction Software toolboxes for power system analysis can be ba-

Essentially, the power system is a dynamic nonlinear system;
the property change of voltage stability is a dynamic pro-
cess from stable state to bifurcation. Both theory and prac-
tice indicate that the bifurcation theory is a powerful tool to
analyze structure stability mechanism of nonlinear dynamic
system. Now bifurcation theory is widely used in power
system voltage stability analysis and has become one of the
important theory tools in voltage stability research [1-5].
Since the resource of solar energy is abundant in China,
especially in the west, such as Qinghai Province, Tibet, Xin-
jiang Autonomous Regions, the parabolic trough solar thermal
power technology has received extensive attention recently.
The main motive of this paper is to develop an experi-
mental platform of the PTCS, and evaluate the performance
of the PTCS. Furthermore, some key parameters that influ-
ence the performance of the PTCS, such as the solar flux,
the flow rate of the HTF, heat loss, are also investigated.
The encouraging results have been obtained, which can
provide fundamental data for developing the parabolic
trough solar thermal power plant in China.
Comparing with traditional linear analysis approaches,
bifurcation theory is more accurate in analyzing the system
stability around critical point neighborhood. But this meth-
od is against complex calculations and modeling difficul-
tiesˈso that appropriate simulation analysis methods are
needed to thorough study of power system bifurcation. This
paper describes the Voltage Stability Toolbox (VST), which
is a flexible tool to analyze power system voltage stability
using bifurcation method.
sically divided into two classes of tools: commercial soft-
wares and educational/research-aimed softwares. The for-
mer commonly used are PSS/E, ATP, PSCAD etc., those
softwares are typically well-tested and computationally ef-
ficient. Despite their completeness, these softwares can re-
sult cumbersome for educational and research purposes. For
research purposes, the flexibility and the ability of easy
prototyping are often more crucial aspects than computa-
tional efficiency. On the other hand, there is a variety of
open source research tools based on Matlab, which are typ-
ically aimed at a specific aspect of power system analy-
sis[6-7].
Some of the Matlab-based toolboxes are: Power System
Analysis Toolbox(PSAT)[6], Matpower, SimPowerSystems
toolbox(SPS), Power System Toolbox(PST), Voltage Stabil-
ity Toolbox(VST)[8-10], and so on. Among these toolboxes,
VST is open source and freely downloadable. This paper
introduces the VST, which is mainly used in the analysis for
power system voltage stability and bifurcation. The main
function of VST includes: power flow calculation, time do-
main simulation, bifurcation analysis, singularity analysis,
etc.
This paper first describes the main structure of VST and
analysis its main function modules; then a five-bus system
with three generators and IEEE 30-bus test system are pre-
sented to show the applicability of the VST, the simulation
results show that the tool is suitable to study the voltage
stability of power system.

*Corresponding author (email: meilaier@163.com) APAP2011 www.apap2011.org

___________________________________
978-1-4244-9621-1/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

 2011The International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection
2 Main Function Introduction of VST
The VST integrates the symbolic and numeric computations
with a graphical menu-driven interface based on MATLAB
and its extended symbolic toolbox. It implements symbolic
computations to build exact load flow equations and Jaco-
bian matrices including 2nd–order derivatives, required to
implement numerical computations such as New-
ton-Raphson (NR) and Newton-Raphson-Seydel (NRS) for
bifurcation analysis. It has proved to be a useful tool for
education and research in the area of power system stability
analysis. Figure 1 shows the schematic diagram of the
VST[11].
Figure 1 Schematic diagram of VST
Load flow calculation
Load flow is the most basic and important calculation of
power system analysis. VST implements the standard NR
algorithm to compute the load flow solutions at a given set
of bus injections. The GUI for load flow calculation allows
the user to set control variables of the NR algorithm such as
tolerance, error, maximum number of iteration, parameter
values and state values.
Bifurcation analysis of voltage stability
VST uses a three-stage NR-NRS-NR algorithm to ana-
lyze voltage stability bifurcation; the first stage uses stand-
ard NR method to iteration until it fails to converge. Then it
automatically switches to the NRS method to find load flow
solutions at and around the Saddle Node Bifurcation(SNB)
point. After obtaining the SNB point, the standard NR
method is switched back to compute low voltage of PV
curve.
Changes in bus injections are achieved through parame-
terization of bus injections with a scalar parameter known
as a bifurcation parameter[9]:
m = m0 + a * m' (1)
where, P is the initial real or reactive power, D is the bifur-
0
cation parameter which denotes the level of load,
m' = [d TPg d TPl d QTl ]T is the vectors of searching direc-
'
tions, T denotes transpose, elements of m are

ìï d = [d ? d ]T
ïï Pg P2 Png
ïï
T
í d Pl = [d Png + 1 ? d Png + npq ] (2)
ïï
ïï d = [d T
ïïî Ql Png + 1 ? d Png + npq ]
where, n is the total node number of the system, generator 1
is the swing bus with zero angel and all the other phase an-
gels are relative to the swing bus; ng and npq are the bus
number of PV and PQ nodes, respectively ˗
Pg = [ P2 ? Pn g ]T is pure active power injection vector of
ng - 1 generators ˗ Pl = [ Png + 1 ? Png + npq ]T and
Ql = [Qng + 1 ? Qng + npq ] are the real and reactive power
T
demands of npq load nodes, respectively; the elements of
d Pg , d Pl and d Ql , can be set to be positive, negative, or
zero depending on the load increase scenario of interest.
Therefore, one may conveniently increase load or gener-
ation at a bus or at a group of buses through equation (1).
VST adopts direct method to obtain static bifurcation
point; the direct method is proposed by Seydel in 1979[12],
which is used to calculate static bifurcation of single pa-
rameter.
Static bifurcation uses NR-NRS two-stage algorithm to
calculate equalization points. The dynamic bifurcation
analysis identifies small-signal stability characteristics by
computing and checking the eigenvalues of the reduced
system Jacobian matrix at each equilibrium point along PV
curve. It will occur three kinds of bifurcation along the PV
curve: SNB, Hopf Bifurcation, and Singularity Induced Bi-
furcation (SIB).
Small-signal analysis
In power system small-signal analysis, system matrix ei-
genvalues have close relations with the system stability.
VST studies small signal stability of a certain point on PV
curve by analyzing system matrix eigenvalues.
VST analyzes the sensitivity of eigenvalue nearby SIB by
the following equations:
[ J ] = 
(3)
[ g y ] = h 
where, J is the Jacobin matrix of the system, gy is the Jaco-
bin matrix of the algebraic equations, O is the biggest real
eigenvalue of J, K is the smallest real eigenvalue of gy, H
and U are the right eigenvector of O and K, respectively.
Dynamic time simulation
With the increasing of modern power system scale and
operation complexity, power system dynamic stability has
attracted more attention; time domain simulation is an im-
portant method to research power system dynamic safety
analysis and control. VST also has the function of time do-
main simulation. The time domain simulation adopts an
 2011The International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection

ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver combined with cond-order derivatives. The dynamic bifurcation and singu-
an algebraic solver at each iteration step. A fourth-order lar points of node 4 is shown in Figure 4.
Runga–Kutta method is used as an ODE solver, while an
NR procedure is implemented as an algebraic solver to up-
date the load bus voltage magnitudes and angles at each
integration step.

3 Numerical examples

Simulation and analysis of five-bus system with

three generators
A five-bus system is analyzed firstly, whose connection
diagram is displayed in figure 2 [13-14].

bus 2 bus 4 bus 1

jX d jX d
G G
generator 2 generator 1 Figure 4 Voltage magnitude at bus 4 of dynamic bifurcation and singular
jX d Pd 4ˈQd 4 points
bus 3
jX d
G As shown in Figure 4, the SNB and SIB are identified as
generator 3 the parameter D changing. The singular points and PV curve
bus 5 Pd5ˈQd5
intersect at SIB; as D equal to 3.0205, the system occurs
SIB. Now the stability performance of low voltage equilib-
Figure 2 Five-bus system with three generators rium points has changing from stable to unstable state. The
high voltage and low voltage equilibrium points coincide
1) Dynamic time simulation when D increases to 3.1633.
The voltage amplitude of node 4 is shown in Figure 3; 2) Singularity and eigenvalue analysis
the lower part of Figure 3 is the partial enlarges figure For a point of PV curve, VST analyzes the small-signal
around SNB. As shown in Figure3, when D is 3.1633 the
stability of the point by computing system Jacobin matrix
system occurring SNB, which is the right most of the PV
curve; exceeding this point power flow cannot be converged; eigenvalues. The distributing and movement of two critical
SNB is corresponds to maximum power point at a certain eigenvalues are shown in Figure 5 as D increasing; uncriti-
load increase mode of the system. cal eigenvalues are not figured and the dotted arrow line in
Figure 5 denote the increase direction of D.

Figure 3 Voltage magnitude at bus 4 of static bifurcation

In VST dynamic bifurcation simulation, a fixed-step size

is used at the NR stage, at the NRS stage, the step size is
changed automatically by VST according to the se-


 2011The International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection

Table 2 we can know that the sensitivity of G3 to D is the

biggest, which is 0.6294. The result validates the change
scheme of D.
Simulation and analysis of IEEE 30-bus test system
The searching directions of injection power and injection
space of IEEE 30-bus test system are set. The voltage sta-
bility bifurcation of IEEE 30-bus test system is simulated by
VST, which equally verifies the applicability of VST in an-
alyzing the bifurcation behavior of voltage stability.
Due to limited space, Table 3 and Table 4 list only part
sensitivity parameters of the system state varieties to left
and right eigenvector.

Table 3 Sensitivity of remedial action vector versus D of D of IEEE

30-bus system

State variables P2 P7 Q7 Q11 Q19

0.2072 0.4013 0.1938 0.2089 0.172
Sensitivity of D
2
Figure 5 Critical eigenvalues plot of the system matrix

Just before D equal to 3.0205, the two critical eigen- Table 4 Sensitivity of null space vector versus D of IEEE 30-bus sys-
values are located in the left half plane in Fig.5, which im- tem
plies stability. As the parameter D changing from one of the
State variables G2 V7 G7 G8 G16 G18
complex eigenvalue to the right half plane and becoming a
0.221 0.21 0.39 0.20 0.22 0.20
large positive number while the other eigenvalue stays in Sensitivity of D
7 40 97 87 32 58
the left half plane, but it becomes a large negative real
number. Therefore, stability feature of the equilibrium un- As shown in Table 3 and Table 4, null space vector of V7
dergoes an instantaneous change from stable to unstable. As and G7 are more sensitive to the increasing D. Similarly, re-
D increasing to 3.1633, a critical eigenvalue of the system medial action vector of P7 and Q7 is more sensitive to the
becomes to zero while the other eigenvalue stays in the left increasing D, which means node 7 is the critical node of the
half plane, now the system occurs SNB. system at the load increase mode. The adjacent region of
Table 1 and Table 2 are the sensitivity of the system node 7 is the dangerous region of the system; to analyze the
state varieties to left and right eigenvector corresponding to change of the system variables around node 7 can provide
the zero eigenvalue of load flow Jacobian matrix at the SNB practical information of prevention and remedial control for
point, respectively; where left eigenvector is remedial action voltage stability.
vector and right eigenvector is null space vector. G, V, P, Q
in Table 1 and Table 2 denote phase angle, voltage ampli- 4 Conclusion
tude, active power, reactive power, respectively.
Power system is a complicated nonlinear dynamic system,
Table 1 Sensitivity of remedial action vector versus D of five-bus sys- its operation stability, especially the voltage stability is an
tem important component of modern power system stability
State var-
analysis. VST, a Matlab-based toolbox for voltage stability
P2 P3 P4 Q4 P5 Q5 bifurcation analysis is introduced in this paper, which has
iables
open source code and user-friendly graphical interface. VST
Sensitivity
0.1254 0.5183 0.1762 0.0810 0.4200 0.7083 is very helpful to understand voltage stability and nonlinear
of D
bifurcation phenomena. The feasibility and validity of the
proposed VST are verified by simulating a five-bus system
Table 2 Sensitivity of null space vector versus D of five-bus system with three generators and IEEE 30-bus test system, the re-
sults show that the VST is a powerful tool to analyze volt-
State variables G2 G3 V4 G4 V5 G5 age stability for power system researchers. The new version
0.152 0.62 0.39 0.21 0.60 0.09 3.0 of VST and its download website is available at:
Sensitivity of D
2 94 76 39 60 84 http://power.ece.drexel.edu/vst.html.
As shown in Table 1, the sensitivity of Q5 to D is the
biggest, which is 0.7083. It can be deduced that adjust Q5 This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
appropriately can further increase the system stability. From China (Grant No. 50877024).


 2011The International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection
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